dali hat

here's a non-sensical doodle I did yesterday...
when I am just aimlessly doodling, I tend to just draw random things, upon which I build, as each idea inspires a new thought, as below:
or sometimes I have several unrelated images filling a page, which I may try to connect by creating a unifying landscape tying them together, as with this scribble from the back cover of an old notebook from school (spanish class, I think):
more examples of progressively-random doodles:

More Bible Study Studies

sunday sketches

Here's some of the sketches that fall out of my pencils, pens, markers, or whatever utensil I have handy while taking in sermons on a Sunday morning. a few are cheaters as they actually were drawn at a Wednesday night Bible study.
this one actually was done over a series of 2 sundays and a wednesday night:


and a landscape done with markers on an odd glossy-type paper that doesn't absorb the ink right away, allowing the markers to smudge and blend with one another, which leads to some interesting possibilities for marker-coloring techniques:
an aborted attempt at combining colored pencils and marker:

just doodling around led to this wolfish sketch:
an assortment of cats:
a portrait done on the sly during a bible study:

a sketch of my nephew done this summer:several quick caricatures done in bible study:

and a fancy marker-and-ink caricature done at a coffeehouse on that glossy marker paper:
I started to do the side-men but ran out of time before I had to leave:
and an assortment of non-representational experiments in texture, form , color, etc:


well, mostly non-representational:

the lion's charge

another colored pencil sketch I did this evening.


playing with it (too much) in photoshop:


the whole page, including a thumnail sketch in the margins (it was on 12x9 paper):

suppertime

Just some doodlin' I did yesterday evening.

Heart of Darkness

a ball-point pen sketch inspired by Joseph Conrad's story, Heart of Darkness. loosely inspired. the trees are admittedly North American in shape & foliage. but conceptually it's inspired by that book.Then i decided to ruin it by adding odd colors with markers. I did this on a photocopy, so that I'd still have the original b& w. the color seems to add a whole different meaning to the image, gives it and entirely different feel. i kind of like it, though it's certainly not much like how I pictured Conrad's story (with the colors, that is).

thumbnail acting

before I start animating, I sometimes will do rough thumbnail drawings to plan the basics of what I want to have happen in the shot. This is an assembling of the thumbnail drawings for a scene in the cartoon I'm currently working on, which I've roughly timed to the music here:

all the basics of what I want are there- a lady pig is in bed, is awakened by noise outside, leaps out of bed and angrily stomps to the window to look out. the last pose is supposed to tie into the action of the next shot is her opening the windows then covering her ears.
the shot before the one in the clip is a vertical pan from the following image:
up to her window:the empty space beside the "Louie's Granola Bar" sign is going to be filled by a building that is bouncing about in time to the music, and will be animated separately and added later.

My next step in animating this "bedroom scene" of my cartoon will be to re-draw the scene again at the actual size I want to work in; first I'll create a layout drawing that includes all the details of the bedroom, and places the character and any other object where I want them to be for optimal compositional effect. On some of my shots I'll do some video reference at this point, though for this shot the actions are simple enough I may be able to skip that step and get right to animation.

Tricks of the Trade 1: "artist or poser?"

Okay, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret only artists are supposed to know about-
When you see drawings like these, where the perspective on the head or hands, or torso is kinda tricky, chances are the artist didn't just draw it up out of his head from thin air. The ones who can afford it, like Norman Rockwell, get models to pose for them...
But the rest of us cheapskate shmoes just use a mirror or get a cheap camera and photograph ourselves as reference.It even works for more cartoony-type characters!

We'n'sday Comics -- pencils

I'm workin' hard to finish the next page of comics! Here's a sneak peek snapshot of the penciled versions...

Redneck Opus

Here's a little piece of commissioned work I just finished recently, a little thing called "the Green-neck farmer." This was inked by hand, then scanned and colored with a lovely little painting-simulation program called ArtRage 3.
Here's an earlier, rough pencil version:

and some conceptual sketches done in an attempt to come up with the central character, based on a number of photos gathered online:

and a few of the images used for inspiration in finding the character with more specific characteristics than I might have come up with right off the top of my head:
...sorry for showing you that last one.